Early years

Carl Oglesby's father was from South Carolina, and his mother from Alabama. They met in Akron, Ohio, where Carl's father worked in the rubber mills. Carl progressed through the Akron Public School System, even winning a prize in his final year for a speech in favor of America's Cold War stance. He went to Kent State University; but dropped out in his third year to try to make his way as an actor and playwright in Greenwich Village, a bohemian area of New York. After a year, he returned to Kent State and graduated, writing three plays and an unfinished novel. He worked at odd jobs until, around 1960, he came to Michigan.

Contact with SDS

He first came into contact with members of SDS in Michigan in 1964. At the time he was thirty years old and had a young family (a wife and three children). He was a technical writer for the Systems Division of Bendix (a defense contractor); at the same time trying to get a part time degree from the University of Michigan. He wrote a critical article on American foreign policy in the Far East in the campus magazine. SDSers read it, and went to meet Carl at his family home to see if he might become a supporter of the SDS. As Oglebsy put it, "We talked. I got to thinking about things. As a writer, I needed a mode of action [...] I was that people were already moving, so I joined up." He became a full time Research, Information, Publications (RIP) worker for SDS.

He became so impressed by the spirit and intellectual strength of the SDS that he rapidly became deeply involved in the organization, becoming its President within a year. Carl's first project was to be a 'grass-roots theatre', but that project was soon superseded by the opposition to escalating American activity in Vietnam; he helped organize a teach-in in Michigan, and to build for the massive SDS peace march in Washington on April 17, 1965. The National Council meeting after was Oglesby's first national SDS meeting.On November 27, 1965, Oglesby gave a speech before tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators in Washington, which became one of the most important documents to come out of the anti-war movement. According to Kirkpatrick Sale: "It was a devastating performance: skilled, moderate, learned, and compassionate, but uncompromising, angry, radical, and above all persuasive. It drew the only standing ovation of the afternoon... for years afterward it would continue to be one of the most popular items of SDS literature."He once unsuccessfully proposed cooperation between SDS and the conservative group Young Americans for Freedom on some projects.

Later years

After the collapse of SDS in the summer of 1969, Oglesby became a writer, a musician and an academic. He wrote several books on the JFK assassination, and the various competing theories that attempt to explain it. He is skeptical of the 'lone gunman' theory. He also recorded two albums, roughly in the folk-rock genre. He taught Politics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College. Oglesby attended the April 2006 North-Eastern Regional Conference of the 'new SDS', and gave a speech. A video of part of the speech can be viewed here, and general documents relating to the convention - including several accounts of Oglesby's speech - can be seen here. He currently resides in Amherst, Massachusetts.